Op-ed: We Signed the United Nations Refugee Protocol, but We Never Signed up for Mass Migration

Greece just announced that it is suspending the processing of illegal North African immigrants making asylum claims for three months after a dramatic surge in numbers, warning that those arriving by boat will be arrested and detained.

Sound familiar? On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing that “aliens engaged in the invasion across the southern border … are restricted from invoking provisions … that would permit their continued presence … including, but not limited to [federal law’s asylum statute] … until … the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”

If the Supreme Court determines that Trump can’t do this without an act of Congress, as a federal judge recently ruled, then Congress should most assuredly act. As Mark Krikorian, my colleague at the Center for Immigration Studies, has posted, “the whole post-WWII asylum regime needs to be scrapped”, explaining in the National Review that the 1951 United Nations Convention Related to the Status of Refugees has been turned into “a crowbar used by the post-national Left to pry open the borders of democratic societies contrary to the will of their citizens.”

Krikorian also made the extremely important but little-known point that “even the people who drew up the Refugee Convention did not intend for it to apply to mass influxes”. Congress should feel free to act in the national interest, unencumbered by inaccurate perceptions as to what the refugee convention “means.”

While the United States was not a convention signatory, we did agree to its “nonrefoulement” obligation by signing the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Article 33 of the convention famously provides that “no Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of” persecution. As I have written, the convention’s negotiators and drafters were laser-focused on ensuring that the obligations their nations would be signing up for did not require them to allow the mass influx of aliens arriving at their frontiers claiming to be refugees. The negotiating history also strongly suggests that the delegates reserved the right of countries to return home participants in mass influxes who had managed to penetrate their borders.

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[Read the rest at the Washington Examiner]